DuckDuckGo, the search engine whose selling point is the fact that it doesn’t track users, has grown by a considerable amount year over year.
The niche search engine boasts a growth of 70% throughout the year of 2015, despite the fact that it hasn’t nearly seen the adoption rate of more mainstream search engines.
According to the company’s own traffic stats, which it makes available publicly, 3.25 billion searches were entered into DuckDuckGo this year.
That marks a 74% increase compared to the same period of last year. DuckDuckGo reached a new record high on December 14th when it received over 12 million queries in a single day.
Of course, none of this looks impressive compared to the hundreds of billions of searches Google handles in a single month. Although for a startup search engine it’s an accomplishment that it has been able to somewhat compete with the other search engines, and actually see continuous growth.
According to a report in Quartz, DuckDuckGo’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg credits the growth to new partnerships with Apple and Mozilla, as well as word of mouth. Weinberg also points to the fact that Americans are becoming more concerned about search engines tracking user data.
The problem with DuckDuckGo, as its CEO also points out, is that it has a product most people don’t even know exists. Those who don’t want search engines to track their data may have no idea there’s an alternative out there.
Although there’s only so many times the company can lean on that excuse without taking action. If it wants to grow, it needs to launch a serious campaign built around education and awareness. It can’t rely on word of mouth alone.
Will be interesting to see, in 2016, if the company builds on this momentum and attempts to get its brand out there in front of more people.
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